’I have truely ridden the bicycle. I know both: the
bicycle and the ride. My perception has not been principally an act but a
background against which all acts and behaviours stand out. I have looked at
perception as an active process allowing it to winnow latent meanings from
human action.’
SOLILOQUY OF A SMALL-TOWN UNCIVIL SERVANT
K.K. Srivastava is the author of three volumes of
poetry: Ineluctable Stillness (2005), An Armless Hand Writes
(2008; 2012), and Shadows of the Real (2012). His poems have been
translated into Hindi (Andhere Se Nikli Kavitayen—VANI PRAKASHAN (2017) and his
book Shadows of the Real into Russian by veteran Russian poet Adolf
Shvedchikov. Srivastava is also reviewer and columnist for the newspapers The
Pioneer and The Daily Star. Currently he works as Additional Deputy
Comptroller and Auditor General. His publisher describes him as ‘very reticent
and reclusive.’
Soliloquy of a Small-Town Uncivil Servant: a literary non-fiction, is Srivastava’s fourth book but first
written in prose. It is organized in 13 chapters, together with a Prologue and
an Epilogue. In the Prologue, the narrator admits that he lost his memory, thus
deciding to “retrieve afresh” and “undertake this journey in order to unravel
the story that will discover me.” The aim is also to “reach the core of the
disjointed identities.” The titles of the chapters already say a lot:
Srivastava writes about growing up in Gorakhpur; his early adolescence, Prof.
Yadav and his uncle; rendevouz with a New World (about his first encounters as
a civil servant); sex and sensuality; authors, books and human behaviour; of
human niceties; women of literature and women in literature; and social media
(“like a fairy tale with ubiquituos surfaces...”). The book propels the readers to a revealing insight into the power of imagination on memories: not only of the
events that have actually occurred, but the ones often imagined. Ambling through the muzzy alleyways
of time, he skillfully shapes his experiences into an amalgam of real and
unreal.
The author declares from the beginning that this is
not a memoir, at the most a semi-autobiographical work. Thus Srivastava is the
author and K.K.the narrator. So I feel. Srivastava
opted for the title “Soliloquy” because the 58-year-old “I” is in conversation
with itself, thus the reader is witness to this interior monologue, or
“exercise in reinventing my imagination, rethinking my cogitations.” Soliloquy
is thus a collection of fragments which together reveal the writer as a whole
during his journey - “an onerous journey not without pain” - which started in
1988 when K.K. wrote his first poem, ‘Birth trauma’. Thus, his birth as a
writer.
K.K. is a staunch beliver in India’s Hindu religion and culture,
traditions, rites, ways of living and family for all of which he has highest
esteem. He reveals himself to be a well-read person, and admits that he grew
up, “Amidst books by eminent authors and under illiterate Amma’s guidance,
insight and forsight, this is what made me.” In fact, Soliloquy is full
of inter-textual references and names of different writers, artists, and
philosophers, hailing both from India and the western world: Murphy and
Watt by Samuel Beckett, V.S. Naipaul’s India: A Wounded Civilization,
Dr. Faustus, Sartre’s Nausea, Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Dickinson,
Peter Shaffer’s Equus, Albert Camus’s The Fall, Salman Rushdie,
Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, R.B. Sheridan’s The Rivals,
Anthony de Mello (priest, therapist and poet), Nirad Chaudhuri’s The Continent
of Circe, Nassim Taleb (Lebanese-American essayist and scholar, but also
statistician, former trader and risk analyst), Narendra Modi’s poetry book A
Journey, Terence’s play Andria, Raj Kamal Jha (writer and master
sculptor), Edward Albee (American playright), Vladimir Nabokov, poetess Kamla
Das, Joseph Conrad, Milan Kundera, Hindi poet Muktibodh, and Ezra Pound. All
are part of Srivastava’s accumulated cultural baggage and wisdom and thus get
reflected in his soliloquies.
Writing about his childhood, Srivastava admits that,
“Sometimes we return to the childhood to get newness.” His writing flows
naturally using crystal clear images (thus “eidetic”), is genuine, and
generates the eventual smile, like when Srivastava remembers his uncle verbally
abusing a stubborn and indifferent horse, or burning pages of Shakespeare’s
plays to prepare tea with a different taste, in the absence of wood or coal; or
when his teacher answers his question: “Don’t ask many questions. My wife makes
life hell for me in the house. At least let me live peacefully here.” K.K.
links one chapter to the next by revealing the subject of the following chapter
at the end of the previous one. His writing - made up of memories, and
descriptions full of animation, movement and life, philosophical and
psychological insights - generates profound reflection and pleasure. I liked
most a number of aphorisms: “You define someone and either you or that someone
is doomed.”; “Human anomalies are our greatest curse, but we live happily with
these.”; “… age dulls us, but beauty lives through us imprisoned inside our
ruined body.” “A reviewer does not look through the windows of other houses; he
has his own windows. But disputants argue that the best reviewers never look
through their windows; they choose others’ windows to kill the bird.”; “Time is
not an imaginary entity. It is a continual palpitation of moments.” He aptly commented adversely on writers when
in 2015, these writers started relinquishing their awards in India. He exhorted
them “Writers must neither live in glass houses nor make castles in the air.
But our award-relinquishing writers do both.”. And further, ‘When books create
controversy, it is welcome and the magnificent grandeur of art lies in
justifying and accepting all such controversies. The real problem arises when award
relinquishing writers create controversies and generously gift themselves the
honour to wallow in these.’’ He attributed
efforts of writers hell bent on returning the awards to their being
intrinsically motivated ‘’to emerge from oblivion’’. “Good bureaucrats know the
art of tiptoeing.”; “Feminism is not ultimate freedom. Feminism has
limitations. Those who believe in it must believe in its limitations.”;
“Literature dies the moment senile old men start assessing young poetess's
works.”; and, “Reality is a dream. By the time you realize it, half of your
life has been lived and you are not sure if the half left over belongs to you
at all.” At times K.K.’s prose takes the form of conversations between him and
Prof. Yadav, the Socratic way. He also includes letters sent to him by some of
his writer-friends living far away and admits that what he misses in India, he
gets from such friends.
On
other occasions, Srivastava mentions or comments on his previous literary works
such as Ineluctable Stillness or Shadows of the Real. He gives us
a clear description of himself: “I believe in the power of words: I write
poems, books of poetry.” Being thus means also being a keen observer or
listener of one’s surroundings. Listening through the closed doors of a lift
while electricity is down, or a conversation with 95-year-old Joe P.K., can
prove to be food for reflection on different aspects of humankind and their
behaviour. Year 2004, travelling by taxi, K.K. gives us a vivid description of
what happens on the roads in small places: a lowly paid guard with a big belly;
women filling discarded containers with water flowing from a pipe; and a naked
boy defecating in public; all mirroring the discomforts people live because of
paucity. Such experiences or circumstances make both K.K. and the reader
reflect and grow and feel motivated to do something for the poor and needy.
During
this voyage K.K. addresses directly the reader and goes up and down memory
lane, referring to particular dates and years: 1979-80, 2017, 2005, 1978, 2014,
2015, 1987-88… Srivastava alternates between narrating, on the one hand,
particular experiences of his own and, on the other, personal reflections on
various issues and worldly happenings. His are words that inspire inquiry: “The
writers I mentioned are dead. But are their ideas dead too?”. He thus writes
about worthwhile things, ignorance and the working of the mind; about the
difference between living and existing; suicide; dreams and images of snow;
correspondence of love through poetry and letters; he describes his beloved as
‘a poem in trance’ (‘’Her curiosity in me aroused curiosity about her in me.
Curiosity met its counterpart. Curiosity is at the root of all love……I am ever
ready to meet life attired in deeper mire of sorrow.’); “real joy” for thinking
persons and writers ; train, platforms and philosophy; age and beauty; American
poet Michael McClure’s concept of Caves and “huge figures” (“… you fellows die
so many times every hour in caves. You people lack reaction, are tawdry,
passive, inarticulate, puny.”); lack of reaction which gives space to
exploitation; rebellion or the need to rebel at least once in a lifetime; Wikipedia today vs the eighties; the
mechanics of coterie and how it controls powerful people; reading bestselling
authors or reading unappealing and forgotten books; “farting aloud”
intellectuals and their inability to confront even simple, let alone difficult,
questions; the need to address broken parts in History which are many; YouTube;
art and literature not being “a knavish business”; creativity, recognition and
awards; wearing the right tie and clothes, social parties and behaviour;
book-reading sessions and “smooth elevation” in upward mobility; India as a
land of marvels, but also as part of humanity with its good and bad points;
feminism; language as a thing of beauty; relationships between men and women,
bachelors and spinsters; words written on taxis; writing (it helps the writer
get out there what he thinks is essential); isolation (“an enlightened freedom,
the freedom which illuminates the world inside the writer.”) some ostentatious persons
from different walks of life being “ replete with stylized arrogance and a
self-eulogized persona”); and much more. K.K. also writes from the
social-economic point of view, citing economists such as G.A. Cohen and Paul
Streeten, and philosophers like John Rawls and Ronald Dworkin applying their ideas
in the context of development in his home town Gorakhpur.
Writing becomes a recording of past encounters: “the
streets, the shops, the colleges, the schools, the University, the vendors, the
hospitals, the libraries and above all the individuals that crowded the city.”
At moments Srivastava is also very critical, and this is another strength in
his writing. His mocking tone is a very important element in his writing style.
While writing about some of the teachers who taught him in University, he
mentions about their “belief [...] in the uselessness of time”, he criticizes
the “creamy-layered professors lacking both wisdom and knowledge.” Progress
means leaving no space for children to play and old people to spend time
together, but also people knowing the art of fitting into particular forms as
these suit them, leaving crowds of patients patiently queuing for long hours
and days, making profits as only concern. Srivastava reminds us of the presence
of the mafia lords in his place of birth, Gorakhpur, known as a Second Chicago
in the past, and where life, once upon a time, was marginalized, hopless and
unyielding. However, K.K. also mentions positive elements of his birthplace
such as the grand Goraknath temple, Gita Press, literary legends and learned
men. It is here that K.K. expresses himself in favour of the art of simple
living, bringing nature very close to it, a reminder very relevant to
concrete-ridden societies, thus revealing himself as a dreamer of a new dawn
for his home town. His honesty and directness are powerful. He writes about
people in parties talking aimlessly, “none interested in listening. Intellectual
inertia or dementia....Exteriours infatuate them: these bring them face to face
with their ilk. That is the precise reason I don’t circulate.’ Suddenly he
cites Vladimir Nabokov,’Where there is beauty, there is pity, for beauty must
die. It dies.’ He thus reminds ostentatious persons of ultimate truth: decay
and end.
In the Epilogue Srivastava confesses that “Eidetic
merger of insights and intuitions is at the core of my narratives.” In
psychology the word “eidetic” relates to or denotes mental images having
unusual vividness and detail, as if actually visible. K.K. also
admits that, “On days I wrote, I felt like walking the road, the way I
imagine I would, on the day of my death. Like moments just before death, which
bring all memories of a man’s life to him before he forgets everything for
good, the end of the days I would write on would bring the same feelings to
me.” Reading Soliloquy from a miniature island Malta: thousands of kms
away from giant and multifold India (K.K thanks his poet friend Bernard
Jackson from UK for maintaing ‘an objective distance’ and for reposing his
total faith in the present efforts for the future good of society) makes me
feel in dire need of reading the book again and again in order to understand
the real depths Srivastava’s writing touch and uncover. Soliloquy is introspective: it opens not only Srivastava’s but also
strongly emerging India’s inner world to be read with gusto. A big thanks to
K.K. for sharing his new work worldwide.
No comments:
Post a Comment